When I entered my role as head of the content at Gong, I was not with a decade of the marketing experience. I came with a sales background and a lot of time to follow leads. This experience turned out to be my unfair advantage.
Here is what I knew about the trenches: Most people are not ready to buy when they grab themselves. Most of them are at least not yet interested in their product. You do not wake up and hope for another cold e -mail or wonder if you should watch another demo page. You are busy doing your jobs.
This mental model led me to a question that changed everything. What if we could earn attention before someone was on the market? What if we, instead of trying to grasp the demand, could we? create It?
We did that in Gong. And we did it by turning the typical SaaS game book upside down.
What is the 95-5 rule?
The 95-5 rule, Popular from the Ehrenberg-Bass InstituteCame out a few years later and immediately confirmed everything we had done.
Here is what it says: At a certain point in time, only 5% of its total addressable market is actively buying. The other 95% are not.
However, most marketing teams invest strongly in tactics with high intelligence tactics, which are only 5%targeted. This approach is short -sighted and slightly exhausted.
When I came to Gong, we made a completely different way. In the first year we were first class. So my team had a hard rule: No talking about our product. None. Zero. We would not write about gong, press functions or create comparison contributions. We would leave that to product marketing.
Instead, our mission was to produce the most appealing content on the planet. We focused exclusively on our audience and their problems and positioned ourselves more than the same age than as a provider.
If you only market buyers, if they are ready for purchase, they are too late. The real opportunity is to win Mindshare with the 95% that are not yet ready.
What Gong did to make the best of the 95-5 rule
How do you actually implement this strategy? Here are some practical approaches that we used at Gong and are still relevant and effective today.
We were obsessed with knowing our audience.
We have made a conscious decision to understand our audience better than anyone else in our category. Not only who they were on paper – job titles, company size, vertical – but how they thought, what they had to fight for and what they kept up at night.
At Gong, our audience were sales employees and sales leaders. And no surprise, her primary focus was on the quota. So we started with this goal and worked backwards. We have shown the entire trip to this goal and identified all barriers on the way:
- Create pipeline
- Writing effective cold e -mails
- Make successful cold calls
- Execution of discovery calls
- Manage demos
Then we converted this sales process into a roadmap into content. We didn’t talk about Gong. We talked about everyday friction points and pain to be on sale.
We focused on the problem, not on the product.
Most Saas companies remain here. By default, you write about your product. You know that. Because it is easier to say: “Here is what we do” than to say: “Here is what you have to fight – and here is what could help.”
But our belief was simple: Nobody takes care of your product until you believe that you understand your problem.
This meant entering the “before” state of the chaotic, frustrating, daily challenges that the repetitions face. And from there useful, implementable guidance that people felt and supported.
We asked ourselves:
- What do you do today and don’t work anymore?
- What did you accept as “exactly as it is”?
- Which assumptions can we better challenge?
For example, most representatives accept that a 1% cold -e -mail -answer rate is normal. So send more E -mails. This is the “old way”.
We painted it. What if you could? improve Your answering rate and actually send fewer E -mails? This story is immediately more convincing.
Small details are also important. With Insider -Aprach signals, she signals that you really understand the audience – it is “pipeline”, not “pipelines” and “end of the quarter”, not “end of the quarter”. These subtle differences indicate their content that they come from a peer rather than a marketer.
They seem to be like little things, but they signal insider knowledge. You tell your audience “We are one of you. “
Tips for relocating lead genes to the audience
Making the shift of Lead gene a audience is a considerable shift in the way of thinking. You have to let go of short-term dopamine hits such as MQLs and Attribution Charts and think like a media company. Then ask, “How do we earn attention today to gain trust tomorrow? “
Here are five things that we did in Gong to build future demand and to expand a brand that has been scaled.
1. Create high -quality content that solves real problems.
If you want people to be careful before they are ready to buy, they have to help them. You need useful content that solves real, frustrating problems.
We assigned the buyer’s journey and jammed all micro-pain points on the way. Everyone was a chance to create something helpful:
- How to write a better cold e -mail.
- How to perform a call to discovery that does not feel like a survey.
- How to deal with price questions without fidding the deal.
These were no pages in disguise. They were independent, high signals resources, and we often didn’t even mention our product.
Why? Because we Wasn’t try to sell. We tried to earn trust.
To make up for this, you need specialist knowledge, either your own or from someone in your organization.
- what is Really Hard over this part of the job?
- What are people doing wrong?
- What is the advice you would have received a year ago?
Use this as your starting point. And indicate your content as if it were from a practitioner, not from a product marketer.
2. Use storytelling to create emotional response.
One of our flagship content series was Gong Labs-unreere originally data complaints research on various aspects of the sales process. But instead of just presenting information, we focused on making it emotionally resonance.
I see that many B2B companies fail because they want to sound like the smartest in the room. A large part of the content has a matter of information, too dry and is not appealing or unforgettable.
Instead, we took a side of Hollywood and used a script technique called “In Media’s Res” that drops the reader directly into the middle of a story. Instead of “here is what the data say”, we would start with an allocated high -voltage scenario.
- You are in a recovery call for five minutes. Your buyer is silent. They crawl through foils and wonder if someone listens at all …
Then we asked the question: “Should you use foils at all?”
This approach immediately depends on the readers and creates an emotional connection before the data delivers. It makes its content unforgettable in a way that purely informative content cannot keep up.
3. Show consistently over several channels.
This comes from my (short -lived) teaching career: people learn differently. Some prefer to read. Some prefer to listen. Some have to see it.
Marketing is no different.
That is why we appeared across formats:
- LinkedIn contributions and blog articles for readers
- Podcasts for audio-first people
- Webinars and short videos for visual learners
This approach had two advantages:
- We have reached more people by diversifying formats.
- Our biggest fans (we called them Raving fans) consumed content over several channels and deepen their connection with our brand.
This not only helped us build up a loyal audience, but also ensured that we had no weaknesses in our content based on when and where they deal with us.
4. Measure the success like a brand, not just a funnel.
Measuring the brand effect can be a challenge, but that does not mean that you shouldn’t try it. Instead of obsessing the load touch assignment, we have followed:
- Audience growth: LinkedIn -Follower, Podcast downloads, newsletter subscribers
- Direct web traffic: People who type our URL directly (a clear sign of the brand recall)
- Incoming options: offers that came to us without having to follow them
This approach requires the documentation of your strategy: Who you help, what problems you solve, where you appear and how you measure progress.
5. Buy in to play the long game.
If the stakeholders are too saturated with questions like “LinkedIn?” Or: “Read someone else?” I turn it around: “If you are looking for new ideas or products, where are you going?”
The answer is almost always your network, LinkedIn, newsletter and podcasts – exactly where your buyers already spend time.
If you receive a buy-in, you need a documented strategy. You must clearly define:
- Who you are helping
- What problems you solve and have their effects on strategic priorities
- Where you appear
- How to measure progress
This becomes your armor when the “What is the ROI?” Questions roles.
Create gravity, not just leads
Most marketers fight for scrap: the 5% of the people who are already on the market. However, if you play the long game and invest in the 95%, you can build something better: a brand that deserves attention before there is ever a sales talk.
At Gong, this approach has contributed to expanding our LinkedIn from 12,000 to over 220,000 followers. Our podcast crossed 100,000 downloads in the first 18 months. The webinar registrations rose from 500 to over 2,500. And we saw how E -Mail openings reached 28%, with the consistent incoming pipeline supporting and accelerating our sales efforts.
But the qualitative shift was even more important:
- Sales employees tell us that you have used our content for onboarding
- Managers who mention that our material has been constantly shared in their slack channels
- Buyers appear to Demos who already believe we could help them
That is the magic of Mindshare. It makes their marketing of an interruption to A pull. From a transaction in a Relationship. From “Who are you again?” To “we have been following you for a while.”
And when urgency strikes or when someone says: “We need a new sales tool” or “let us rethink our strategy”, you are the first name you remember.
This is not lucky. This is a brand.
So if you are fed up with watching leads, it may be time to turn the script around. Create content that helps. Show yourself consistently. Talk to the 95%.